Last Sunday, Michael McIlveen went out for a pizza with some friends. They were on their way home, close to midnight, when a gang of ten attacked them. The gang came armed with baseball bats, clearly out for a night of fighting.
Michael and his friends ran, but after about half a mile, the gang had Michael cornered in a dark alley. The fifteen-year-old boy was beaten, and when he was down, members of the gang stomped on his head. He was able to make it home, but his family rushed him to the hospital, where he died the following morning.
There's been an outcry, as expected, from religious leaders and politicians. Aghast, they are, and the hand wringing and wailing and moaning are near deafening. This is wrong, they all say, to beat a lad to death because he is Catholic. We must learn to live together, can't we all just get along?
Protestants and Catholics live in separate communities, little ghettos, and never have anything to do with each other. They attend separate schools, and attempts to build integrated facilities has been met with claims of tight budgets and there's enough desks out there already.
It's amazing, how the North of Ireland is exactly like America's south during the Jim Crow era. Two groups of people eye one another through a lens of stereotypes and false notions. Those in power live in fear that the downtrodden will take over and then the world will end, surely. The downtrodden live in fear of those in power, fearing for their very lives if they say the wrong thing or wear the wrong clothes.
There are plenty of folks who are up in arms over the use of Shannon Airport by the American military, in hysterics about all the poor innocent Iraqis who are killed by the brutal soldiers. But the occasional Catholic beaten to death or pounded to a pulp in the homeland? They've bigger fish to fry, apparently. There's no glamour in protesting the murder of innocent children in Ballymena.
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